A Graduation Speech for the Parents
Because hey, you're graduating something, too!
It’s graduation season, folks.
Everywhere you look, freshly-minted high school and college graduates are being launched into the real world with only a mortarboard and diploma to protect them. The pomp and circumstance doesn’t stop there, though. Heck, virtually everyone gets a graduation ceremony these days. Eighth grade? You’re graduating middle school! Fifth grade? Why, you’re graduating elementary school! Kindergarten? Sure, why not!
(Maybe you’re graduating from Velcro to shoelaces. If so, you’re ahead of the schedule I kept as a kid.)
Now, there was a time when I was cynical about Graduation Creep.
The broad present-day notion of what merits a graduation is a generational shift, to be sure; I’m only in my early forties, and even then, I don’t recall having ceremonies for anything but high school and college. The idea that a fifth-grader would need a ceremony for moving to the building next door seemed patently ludicrous to me.
I’ve changed my tone, though!
These days, I’m in favor of any and all graduation celebrations. Heck, if there’s anything the pandemic taught us (note: I don’t think there is), it’s that we should have them whenever we have the chance, just in case! More than that, though, I’ve come to realize that we simply don’t take the opportunity to stop and look around often enough. That’s all a graduation really is, isn’t it? It’s a breather, a brief moment of appreciation before barreling ahead into the future. My kids are finishing up second and fourth grade this week, and while those might not be terminal years of anything in particular, they’re still milestones worth appreciating.
I’m not a politician, poet laurete, professional athlete or private-sector poobah, but I’m not going to let that stop me from writing a graduation speech.
(Heck, I brought my own podium.)
Today, though, I’m not here to address the students.
No, this is a graduation speech for the parents.
Because, hey—you’re graduating something today, too. You deserve to celebrate!
[clears throat]
[taps mic]
[sips water]
To the parents of 2024-25 graduates—welcome. Thank you for gathering today for this celebration of the year that was. I’m sorry that we had to have it at 5:48am on a Tuesday, but that was the only time that worked with everyone’s end-of-year schedules. This is an exciting moment in your lives, and I know you don’t have many of those these days, so truly: let’s celebrate.
First, celebrate that you got them there.
Whether it was a long car ride to college or simply a daily morning scramble to get them to the bus (because you were absolutely not dealing with that elementary school car line), you got them there. It’s often said that just showing up is ninety percent of success in life. Well, you can lay claim to a good 60 of that 90, and that’s almost as high a percentage as I got in my last year of high school Spanish.
To that, I say: buen trabajo, damas y cebollas!
Next, I want you to be glad that you can finally delete all those apps from your phone.
The bus tracker app? It’s passed you by. The report card app? Time to give it an “incomplete”. The school information portal? Send it to the transfer portal! The cafeteria-money-depositing app? Huck it like a wad of mashed potatoes in a food fight. Your phone’s been running a cool 350 degrees for the last nine months trying to process digital permission slips and extracurricular schedules, and you can finally give it the break it so desperately needs.
(It doesn’t matter if they’re coming back to the same school in the fall. All those apps were going to be replaced by newer, bigger, buggier ones next year anyways.)
I see a few of you trying to eat breakfast right now, and that brings me to the subject of food. Have you been packing lunchboxes every morning? No? Yeah, me neither. Enough barely-touched sandwiches and not-even-looked-at baby carrots came back that I long ago decided they could take their chances with the public-school cafeteria food.
(It’s a good way to make them appreciate my cooking more.)
That doesn’t mean that some culinary pressure isn’t being lifted, though. We’ve had to keep an arsenal of lunchbox snacks on hand for the past nine months, because most of the children’s actual nutrition comes not from the Food Pyramid, but from Goldfish, Pirate’s Booty, Cheez-Its and Nature Valley Bars. (Today’s a good day to vacuum out the back seat of the van, by the way.) God forbid any of these provisions ran out on a weekday—that’s the kind of thing that could send a morning off the rails entirely.
Of course, it’s not just your mornings that will be different—the end of a school year means that those mad-dash evenings are going away, too. Mastering the after-school gauntlet of racing from Robotics Club to soccer to Drama Club to Girl and/or Cub Scouts and back home before bedtime has you fully qualified go on The Amazing Race, but all you’ll really want is to eat dinner sitting down for the first time in months.
(You won’t. But you could.)
What’s that you say? Your kid is playing travel sports this summer, so the extracurriculars aren’t over? Well, that’s what we call a self-inflicted wound, folks.
(Couldn’t be me.)
Back to the school day, though. The kids have learned a lot this last year, but so have you! You might not have been sitting in History or Math or French class with them, but chances are that you added a few new words to your vocabulary over the last year, and I think that’s pretty Skibidi Ohio Rizz of you.
(I do not know what any of that means, and I do not wish to be told.)
Hey, speaking of rizz: you know what it won’t be next week?
It won’t be Spirit Week!
Scott Hines
You’ve pulled together last-minute animal-print outfits and washed favorite-college-team shirts the morning of on more than a few occasions this year, but now you’re free from the grasp of mandatory whimsy. Worst-case scenario, it’ll be months before you’re tasked with finding them something appropriate to wear after stores have closed the night before Fuschia Friday.
(Honestly, though, you should take the time to stock up on fuschia now. Can’t be too safe with these things, what with the trade war and all. Domestic fuschia production has lagged for decades.)
Finally—and seriously—appreciate the time that just passed.
There were surely some ups and downs this year—hopefully more of the former than the latter—but what’s done is done. You’ve made it through a season of busy schedules, snow days, inscrutable grievances, friend-group dramas, Chromebook troubleshooting sessions, last-minute posterboard scrambles, back-to-back-to-back birthday parties, snow days1, lost water bottles, scraped knees, bruised egos, broken hearts and more. With all that going on, it’s easy to lose sight of just how much has changed in the forest while you’ve been tending to the trees.
Just take a look at those photos you posed on the porch back in August.
They’re not the same people anymore, are they?
Well, neither are you. It feels a little bit like graduating after all, doesn’t it?
Take a deep breath, and relish the moment.
(Okay, moment’s up. Summer camps start Monday, and oh BUDDY are they gonna be inconveniently-timed.)
—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)
I know I listed snow days twice but we had like twelve of them this year. ↩
